Help Desk Geek – Help Desk Tips For IT Pros

Do you love the visual tabs available in Opera but don’t want to give up your beloved Firefox?

There are two extensions for Firefox that, together, can emulate behavior similar to the visual tabs in Opera. The Tab Sidebar extension provides a sidebar in the browser that can act as a replacement to the main tab bar, complete with preview thumbnails that are always visible and in-tab navigation buttons. The Tab Preview extension provides previews of non-active tabs on the tab bar.

Tab Sidebar

First, we will install Tab Sidebar to get the visual tabs like Opera.

Install Tab Sidebar from

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6535/.

Once the Tab Sidebar is installed, select Sidebar | Tab Sidebar from the View menu to activate it.

NOTE: You can also press Ctrl + Shift + E to activate the Tab Sidebar.

Previews of all the open tabs display in the sidebar at the left side of the Firefox window. Moving your mouse over each preview displays a slightly bigger preview of the tab.

To view more tabs, use the wide arrow buttons at the bottom and the top of the sidebar to scroll down and up through the tab previews.

There are some options you can set to customize the Tab Sidebar. To access these options, select Add-ons from the Tools menu.

The Add-ons dialog box displays. Scroll through the list until you find Tab Sidebar and select it. Click the Options button.

The Tab Sidebar Options dialog box displays. If you want the tab bar to displays even when the sidebar displays, select the Hide the tab bar when the sidebar is open check box. Use the Display navigation buttons check box and the Display page previews check box to show or hide these features.

If you want the Tab Sidebar to emulate Opera’s visual tabs more closely, you can select Top from the drop-down list in the Position box.

Click OK when you are finished setting the options.

The visual tabs now display above the tab bar, and scroll buttons are available on the left and right sides of the tab previews.

Click the X button in the upper, right corner of the Add-ons dialog box to close it.

To close the Tab Sidebar and get the tab bar back, press Ctrl + Shift + E, select Sidebar | Tab Sidebar from the View menu, or click the X button on the Tab Sidebar header.

Tab Preview

Now, we will install the Tab Preview extension to get tab previews on the non-active tabs on the tab bar.

Download Tab Preview from

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6132/

You do not have to do anything to activate Tab Preview. Simply move your mouse over a non-active tab to see a preview of the current web page on that tab.

To access Options for Tab Preview, select Add-ons from the Tools menu as mentioned earlier in this post. Select the Tab Preview add-on and click the Options button.

The Tab Preview dialog box displays. Select an option in the Preview Size box to specify the size for the tab previews. If you want a delay before the preview displays, select the Before displaying preview, wait check box in the Preview Delay box and specify a time in milliseconds in the edit box.

If you want to display the web page in the currently-scrolled position on the preview, select the Have preview display the scrolled position radio button in the Preview Scrolled View box.

The combination of these two extensions is a good substitute for the visual tabs available in Opera and allow you to continue to use Firefox if that is your preferred browser.

by Lori Kaufman